Design for Jaipur Column - a photo on Flickriver

            Design for Jaipur Column, New Delhi, India: Perspective c1920
Edwin Landseer Lutyens, drawn by William Walcot
Pencil, coloured washes and gouache on laid paper

Here Lutyens (future president of the RA) proposes a 45-metre-high column for the central courtyard of the Rashtrapati Bhavan, the presidential residence in New Delhi. It was built to commemorate the Delhi Durbar, which marked the transfer of India’s capital from Calcutta to New Delhi. Lutyens was influential as an architect in Britain and was responsible for much of the architecture of the British Raj. An area of New Delhi is still known as “Lutyens’s Delhi”, because of the predominance of his architecture.*


Constructing Whiteness
The scarcity of cotton during the American Civil War (1861–65) was disastrous for the British textiles industry, upon which around a sixth of the English population were dependent for their livelihoods. The crisis reveals the extent to which, post-abolition, the British economy relied upon slave labour in the Southern States. Betye Saar is a Los-Angeles based artist. Saar’s assemblage ‘I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break’ (1998) links the legacies of enslavement in the USA to the oppressive conditions under which Black women continued to work in a segregated society into the twentieth century, until segregation laws were challenged by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
In early twentieth-century India, ‘khadi’ cotton became an important site of resistance to British colonial rule, promoted by Mahatma Gandhi as a means of taking back economic control through home-spun rather than imported British cloth.
During the same period in Britain, growing conservatism within the Royal Academy towards avant-garde artistic movements led some Academicians to resign. Frederick Elwell’s painting ‘The Royal Academy Selection and Hanging Committee 1938’ (1939) points to an institutional whiteness that persisted post-war. Artists of the Windrush generation and after – referred to by the Jamaican-British cultural theorist Stuart Hall as “the first postcolonials” – faced a lack of representation in museums and visual culture.
Artists associated with the Black Arts Movement in Britain during the early 1980s, including Sonia Boyce, transformed the artistic, academic and cultural landscape, and are today among Britain’s most celebrated artists.*


From the exhibition


Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change
(February - April 2024)

‘Entangled Pasts’ explores connections between art associated with the Royal Academy of Arts and Britain’s colonial histories. At its founding by artists in 1768, under King George III, the institution’s first President, Joshua Reynolds, called the RA an ‘ornament’ to Britain’s empire. For over 250 years, artists and architects active in Britain have experienced and expressed divergent relationships to imperial histories. Individually, through families and via patrons, the links are innumerable and entwined. Today, the legacies of colonial histories continue to form part of the fabric of everyday life, physically and emotionally, across social, economic, cultural and political fields both national and global.
Works of art have always been agents of change, flashpoints of debate and producers of fluctuating meanings. A painting, sculpture, drawing, print, film or poem can act as a powerful lens through which complex situations can be viewed and nuanced understandings of them can emerge. ‘Entangled Pasts’ brings together 100 artworks to explore the role of art in shaping narratives of empire, colonialism, enslavement, resistance, abolition and indenture. An exhibition on this vast and complex subject is necessarily a partial, fragmentary view. Moments of history are refracted through the eyes of artists, especially contemporary British artists of the African, Caribbean and South Asian diasporas.
These artworks can represent only a fraction of the institution’s colonial links and the unfolding legacies of British colonialism around the world. Yet, in the visual and conceptual resonances between them, there exists a space for contemplation, inquiry, acknowledgement, reflection, imagination and ongoing conversations..
[*Royal Academy]

Taken at the Royal Academy
   

Taken on: April 14, 2024

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14.04.24

London

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#EntangledPasts

Entangled Pasts, 1768–now: Art, Colonialism and Change

Art, Colonialism and Change

Art

Colonialism

Change

Royal Academy of Arts

colonial histories

King George III

Joshua Reynolds

Britain’s empire

imperial histories

empire

enslavement

resistance

abolition

indenture

African

Caribbean

South Asian

diasporas

Constructing Whiteness

cotton

American Civil War

British textiles industry

slave labour

Southern States

Betye Saar

I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break

Civil Rights Movement

khadi cotton

colonial rule

Mahatma Gandhi

Frederick Elwell

The Royal Academy Selection and Hanging Committee 1938

institutional whiteness

Stuart Hall

the first postcolonials

Black Arts Movement

Sonia Boyce

Design for Jaipur Column, New Delhi, India: Perspective

Design

Jaipur Column

New Delhi

India

Perspective

Edwin Landseer Lutyens

William Walcot

Pencil

coloured washes

gouache

laid paper

Rashtrapati Bhavan

presidential residence

Delhi Durbar

British Raj

Lutyens’s Delhi « less

Sets appears in: • City of Westminster • Royal Academy more » • Artworks • Galleries & Museums « less

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